


If You Choose to Live, Turn to Page 52

by cathedraltunes



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fix-It, Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 08:02:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27679825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedraltunes/pseuds/cathedraltunes
Summary: As a kid he’d read those Choose Your Own Adventure books to Sam, in motels across the many great, anonymous states of the American nightmare.Dean dies. Or doesn't. AU for 15x20.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 15
Kudos: 146





	If You Choose to Live, Turn to Page 52

As a kid he’d read those Choose Your Own Adventure books to Sam, in motels across the many great, anonymous states of the American nightmare. Sam liked the books where you were a race car driver or a fighter pilot or a detective like Tom Selleck on the TV, but Dean liked the science fiction ones. They’d pick out all the deaths and compare them to each other, trying to figure out which one was the grossest or the funniest or the dumbest.

“You gotta write it down!” Dean said. “Page 88 is where you fall into the cannibals’ spike pit.”

“No, page 88 is the gators.”

“Alligators only live in Florida.” He sneered. “They’re crocodiles.”

“You’re wrong,” Sammy insisted. The motel’s pen looked too big pinched between his small fingers. “There’s gators in China. I saw it on TV.”

“The crocodiles,” Dean said loudly, “are on page 98.” They’d fought about it for a couple minutes. 

Then Dad had come in the door with smoke in his breath and his hair matted to his cheeks. Dean put the book under the mattress. “Get a beer,” he muttered to Sam, who went wide-eyed to the cheapass mini fridge by the bed.

Dad said, “Dean, get your ass over here. Got stitching needs doing.”

Dean got the sewing kit outta the go bag. A clink sounded: Sam popped the cap off the bottle. While Dean stitched, Dad drank. He cussed some and smacked Dean when Dean put the needle in bad, but he also asked Sam a couple math questions that Sam chirped out all the right answers to.

“Good, Sammy,” Dad said. Sam beamed and Dad rested one huge hand on his head and tousled all that curly little kid hair Sam had, and Dean loved ‘em both so much it made his stomach hurt. 

At night sometimes Dean would open up one of his own Choose Your Own Adventures. He’d find a good ending. Memorize the page. Try and find his way back to it on his own.  _ The brave intergalactic explorer recovers his ship from the aliens!  _ Maybe it was cheating, going backwards like that. He did it anyway. They put too many bogus deaths in the books.

He grew out of them after a couple years. Dad needed another man to do the good work. The righteous work. He left the kid books to Sam. Sam needed them more. It made it easier for Sam, pretending.

  
  
  
  


The rebar punched through the abdominal wall. It penetrated these organs in this order: the right kidney, the liver, and the stomach. The intestinal organs spasmed. Shock rapidly presented.

Dean knew none of this. He only knew the pain. First pain, then the blood fluid tissue hot in his throat as the stomach in its clenching around the bent rebar lodged in it evacuated its new contents up the esophagus. He clamped a hand over his side. He felt the ridged metal a pole inside him.

He said, “Sam?” 

He thought, stupidly, of the dog. Who was going to take Miracle out to piss? He thought of the dog and then he thought of the way the dog took up half the god damn bed. The dog smell got into the sheets, the pillow covers, even the t-shirts Dean slept in. Sometimes at night Dean would wake muzzily to Miracle making soft, injured sounds: a nightmare. Dean would rest his hand on that warm concave doggy belly. Under his hand Miracle’s breathing would even. His paws would go still. He’d sigh. 

Sam said, “Dean?” and his huge steady hands touched Dean’s arms, his gut now filling with blood. 

Hey, Billie, Dean thought, hope you didn’t lose my number. He shuddered. He looked up at Sam. He opened his mouth with his blood-stained teeth. He said:

  
  
  


It was all right. He figured it had to be. If he was going to die again, for real this time, no take backs and no divine intervention, then it was good to die so Sam could live. Yeah. Yeah, he told Bobby, yeah, this was good. This was right. 

“You look after Sam,” Dad had told him, even before the fire. One of the first things John ever really got wedged in Dean’s brain. Four years old looking at the new baby curled up in a cardboard box in the place of a crib, learning: “That’s your job, Deannie. You’re the oldest. So you gotta be the man.”

Mom said, “Oh, John, let up. He’s four. When’s he gonna do more’n change a diaper for the next couple years?”

Dad grinned and laughed. He could laugh in a way that made you feel like you were the strongest you could be. Like you were more than you. Even when Dean was four he felt it settle in his bones, his dad’s laugh.

“Boy’s gotta learn soon. That’s the way it’s gotta be.” 

Yeah. Yeah, that was how it had to be. That was just the way it was. He took the Impala, his dad’s Impala, down a long dirt road that sprayed dust and grit and small rocks around it like the wake of a shark moving through shallow waters. He didn’t think of anything. Heaven stretched out all around him, heaven without end, heaven without a soul to see, and he didn’t think a single damn thing. 

He could see Ellen. He could see Jo. Charlie, Kevin, Mom. How many people died so he could wind up here? He imagined the movement of wings. Dean pressed the accelerator. The car rumbled around him. He wondered what might happen if he imagined a tree. He wondered what might happen if he drove right into it. Dead on center. Maybe if he did something like that then he wouldn’t have to imagine wings or get down on his knees and pray again to silence.

He thought about it. He thought about it a long time. Years, maybe. Then he put it all out of his head. He was good at that. He was real good. Heaven made it easier somehow. He could drift without thinking, without a dream. Nothing to care for, nothing to want. 

Paradise, you could call it. Some people did.

  
  
  


Or maybe fuck that. Maybe somebody turned to another page. Maybe he dreamt the whole thing.

Dean woke up morphine-drunk in the dark of a hospital room. ‘Woke up’ stretched the definition. He came up through a darker fog to a gentler fog. His mouth was dry. Breathing produced a dull and swaddling ache in his chest. Wha’ fug? he thought. He twitched the fingers of his left hand. Two of the fingers were taped together. He looked unseeing at the tube laced and taped between them.

Someone lingered in the shadows. Dean split his lips apart. They felt as if they tore. He tried to speak. His mouth was too dry. He tried again. The coughing made his chest rip bright with fire. Then the morphine dulled it.

Cas? he thought. Cas? He thought, it can’t be Castiel. His chest pulped. 

The shadow moved. Castiel walked silently to stand beside the bed. His coat hung loose around his knees. He pressed the knuckles of his right hand to the thin cot.

He said, “Hello, Dean,” and he brushed those knuckles gently across the back of Dean’s bare hand. A smile touched at Castiel’s eyes. It made him look even sadder than he usually did. He bent and did something strange. He kissed Dean’s brow. 

Dean’s eyes fluttered shut. The pain in his head ebbed. Saliva gentled his mouth. He rolled his tongue against his teeth.

“Hey,” he mumbled. He sounded like shit. “‘M gonna tell you. Used to think y’were dick.”

“I was a dick.” Castiel held Dean’s hand. “You already told me. Repeatedly. At length. Sometimes at volume.”

“‘Cause you were a dick.”

“If it’s any consolation,” said Castiel, “you’re an asshole.”

Dean laughed. He coughed again. He tried to pull at Castiel’s hand but his fingers were loosey-goosey and his wrist was taking a nap. 

Castiel let him tug weakly. Then he sat in a chair beside the bed and firmed his grip around Dean’s hand. Silence settled comfortably between them. Dean dozed a moment, two. A few more. He stirred.

“You sneak in?”

“Yes,” said Castiel. “I told them that it was imperative I see my patient.”

“Oh, shit, doc. Is it bad?”

Castiel was quiet. He stroked his fingertips lightly across Dean’s wrist.

“That bad, huh.” Dean lidded his eyes. It was remarkable how heavy his eyelids proved. “Where were you?”

“The Empty,” said Cas. “Jack found me.”

“Thought God couldn’t. Do that.”

Castiel gave him that odd tipped bird smile. “Jack is special.”

“He’s a good kid.”

“He is,” said Cas.

“Dunno where he gets it from.”

“From his father, I would guess.”

“Brag.”

Cas squeezed Dean’s hand. “His other father.” 

Dean thought. “Sam.”

“You’re a terrible patient,” said Cas.

“Kiss it better, nurse,” he muttered. 

Castiel sighed. He lifted Dean’s hand and did press his lips dryly to the knuckles there. Unaccountably, Dean felt his eyes start to itch. Castiel pressed a kiss to the soft underside of Dean’s wrist. Then he leaned forward out of the chair and pressed a kiss to the hospital gown layered over Dean’s abdomen, and Dean gasped as the light scoured him. 

The morphine continued dripping into him. He convulsed. Castiel laid a big hand in the center of Dean’s chest and held him steadily down until the last of the fire shook out of Dean’s toes.

“I heard you,” Castiel told him in something like a whisper. “When I was in the Empty.”

Tears pressed out from Dean’s eyes. His body trembled as if made new. His skin shivered. The hairs on his arms stood on end.

“I was dreaming. Horrible things. Things I deserved to see. Every vow I broke,” said Castiel. “Every person I allowed to die. Every angel I saw fall. I saw you die again and again.”

“Wasn’t your fault.” Dean swallowed hard. His throat scraped. “Wasn’t always your fault.”

“I heard your voice calling out to me like a trumpet’s sound, in the pit of my despair,” Castiel told him. “Jack pulled me out. But it was you who woke me up, Dean.” He sighed, a little pinched sound. “It’s always you.”

“What about you? Don’t have to sound like I’m doing you some huge disservice giving a shit about you.” 

Dean shrugged upright in the cot. He pulled at the tube he thought must be feeding the morphine. Fuck it, he thought; he pulled the rest of the tubes out even as the needles dragging free made lines of pain burn up his arm all over again. His head was clearing. 

“Yes,” said Castiel, watching this. “Of course. You’re right. Dean,” he said, “you must remember. What I told you.”

Dean squinted at him. “What you told me?”

That sadness made Castiel’s eyes so dark. The birdlike inhumanity of him made him strange, distant. Through the drugs, through the pain prickling at his arm, the huge hollow soreness between his fingers, the strange tenderness of his side, Dean remembered: a bloody handprint pressed to his shoulder. Dean remembered.

“I love you,” said Castiel again.

Dean said, “Fuck you.”

Castiel said, “I understand this may be difficult to accept. It wasn’t until very recently that I myself understood I could experience romantic love. That I did experience romantic love.”

“No, fuck you,” said Dean, clamping his hand around Castiel’s, “fuck you saying something like that then just getting, fucking ripped off like a band-aid. Fucking eaten by Nexxus!”

“It was the only thing I could do.”

“Bullshit.” Dean swayed some. God damn morphine. So easy to forget how much you hated it and its skank ass. “Bullshit! There had to have been another way. We could’ve figured out another way.”

“We didn’t have the time,” said Castiel. “You would have died. And I’m here now.”

“And what if you weren’t?” Dean fought with the shit still tangled around him. “Man, fuck you, like you would’ve left a map to the Empty. How was that worth it?”

That asshole muscle stuck out on Castiel’s cheek. He’d set his jaw. 

“Because I love you,” said Castiel. “And I’m given to understand that when you love someone, you don’t want to watch them die if you can stop them dying.”

Dean kicked his way off the cot. For his troubles, he slipped and nearly landed flat on his ass. His body resisted entirely. Castiel caught him and for Cas’ troubles, Dean shoved him hard in the chest with both hands. 

“You ever think,” Dean said through his teeth. “That maybe. Just maybe. I’m a little sick! Of watching people I love trying to save me!” Shouting made his head swirl.

“I’m rubber and you’re glue,” Castiel retorted, “and whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!”

“What the fuck, are you four?” Dean demanded. His hands on Castiel’s chest had curled to hold for balance. He tried not to think about his ass hanging out in the wind. “What the fuck does that even mean?”

“It means that watching you throw your own life away as if it means nothing, as if it doesn’t matter to anyone,” Castiel said, slowly beginning to shout, “I’ve decided I’m not going to let that happen anymore!”

“Which you can’t fucking do,” Dean shouted back, “when you’re in the god damn abyss!”

“That’s our son’s name!” said Castiel. “You could be more supportive!”

“And why would I want to live,” Dean snarled, his throat aching, his eyes burning, the whole of him a hateful yearning thing, something that tender that ought to be broken, “if it means someone else, someone I love has to die?”

“Dean,” said Castiel, wretched, “why do you want so badly to die?”

“I don’t!” said Dean. He looked at Castiel. He felt the cot at the backs of his thighs. He thought of the nurses who ought to be running into this room now that he’d ripped out all the monitoring equipment. He knew the stillness around them.

“I don’t,” Dean said. “I don’t want to die. I want…”

Castiel covered Dean’s hands with his own. “Tell me what you want.” He said it in the old way, how he used to speak to Dean at the start. 

“Jesus, Cas,” Dean said.

“Tell me what you want,” said Cas again. His fingers trembled minutely, like the delicate shifting of feathers as a bird on a sill prepared to leap into the air trusting its wings would carry it.

Dean swallowed the hurt. He sat unevenly. The metal frame of the bed pushed uncomfortably into his thighs. Before him, in the shadows, Castiel knelt. Dean looked down into that strangely shaped face, that familiar face, that wonderful broad-made face. 

“I had a dream,” Dean said abruptly. “I died. And you weren’t there.”

Castiel rested a hand on Dean’s knee. His palm was cool, his fingers cold. He always had run to the chillier side of things. 

“And I wanted to call you. But I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I will always come,” said Castiel, unblinking. “It might take me a while sometimes. But I’ll come to you.”

Dean shuddered. He made fists of his toes. He flexed his jaw. His stubble itched. 

He said, “Sam?”

Castiel said, “Your brother knows I’m here.”

Dean closed his eyes. He screwed them shut. His chest felt as if were torn open again, as if long ropes of fluid organ threatened to spill in his lap. You’re a man now, Dean. You gotta look out for them.

He said, “Uh. I wanna. I really wanna watch, um, Sam get married. And have kids. And I want to get a house with a yard, for Miracle. I’m taking care of Miracle, by the way. The dog? And uh, I want to get a job. A real job. I, uh, I’m pretty good with my hands, so I figure I could.”

Castiel made a quiet inquisitive noise. “Go on.”

Dean opened his eyes. He looked at the ceiling. When his breath had evened out, he looked at Castiel.

He said, “I want to live. Just, uh, do the human thing. And I want you to be there too.”

“Wherever you want me,” said Castiel in that heartbreaking way he had of saying yes. Of course. If you need me.

Dean shook his head. “No. Not ‘cause. Not like that. I want you there, because uh, because I thought about it, and the thing about it is, Cas, the thing that, um, I’m trying to say is that I love you. Also.”

“Okay,” said Castiel.

“And you love me.”

“Yes,” said Castiel.

“So I think,” said Dean. “That uh. Well, I’m not getting younger.”

“Dean,” said Castiel earnestly, “I will always love you. Even when you’re incontinent.”

“Sometimes I wish you never learned about jokes,” said Dean, but he was laughing, laughing although it hurt and maybe it felt more like crying than anything else. 

Castiel pressed a hand to each of Dean’s knees and slowly, he rose. His nose brushed Dean’s nose. He looked deeply at Dean. He said, “Dean. When you die, I intend to go with you.”

Dean moved with unease. “What, like suicide pact?”

“No,” said Castiel. “For me it would be more like … partial retirement.”

“I got some ideas on how to fix heaven up a little nicer,” said Dean.

“That’s good to hear,” said Castiel. “Jack is very open to suggestion.”

“He got a customer feedback line?”

“Dean,” said Castiel, “I’m going to kiss you now. Please let me know if I need more practice.”

He kissed Dean. Dean palmed Cas’ nape. Castiel’s hair was rougher than Dean’s own, the ends split and coarser for it. 

They parted. Dean’s breath came foggily between them. 

“You could use some work,” said Dean.

Castiel nodded. “Would you like my customer feedback line?”

“Yeah, gimme your pager,” said Dean.

“I don’t know what that is,” said Castiel.

“Wanna knock over this hot dog stand?” asked Dean.

Castiel said, “Dean,” frowning. “Not on the first date.”

Dean said, “Jesus. I really love you, you know? Dipshit.”

Castiel said, “Please excuse me,” and heaved Dean from the hospital bed. He turned slightly on his heel. 

Dean said, “Weird, feels like there’s a hand on my ass.”

Castiel said dryly, “Strange. Feels like there’s an ass in my hand,” and he took a single world-spinning step forward into Dean’s apartment and laid Dean gently on his own bed. He took advantage of the moment to press a chaste kiss to the corner of Dean’s mouth.

Dean grabbed him by the lapel and drew him nearer. Castiel loomed over him in the bed. His coat cut off the light coming in through the street-facing window.

“Where’s Miracle?”

“Sam’s watching him,” said Castiel. He brushed two fingers through Dean’s overgrown hair. “You should rest.”

Dean thought of a road stretching endlessly on before him, a dirt road with nothing to show for it but the grind beneath the Impala’s wheels. He cleared his throat.

“You know,” said Dean gruffly. “I think I got time.” He touched his hand to Castiel’s cheek. He rose up on his elbows. Castiel’s lashes pressed thin and dark along his cheeks. Dean kissed him sweetly in the dark, as sweetly as he ever knew how to kiss. 

He wasn’t entirely sure how he’d wound up here, on this page of things. He’d figure it out. The way Castiel gripped his shoulders, Dean thought he’d have some help.


End file.
